Turbolinks maintains a persistent process, just like single-page applications do. It intercepts links and loads new pages via Ajax. The server still returns fully-formed HTML documents. This strategy alone can make most actions in most applications feel really fast. For Basecamp, it sped up the page-to-page transition by ~3x.

But Turbolinks alone is only half the story. Prior to Stimulus, Basecamp used different styles and patterns to apply “JavaScript sprinkles”.

Stimulus rolls up the best of those patterns into a modest, small framework revolving around just three main concepts: Controllers, actions, and targets. It’s designed to read as a progressive enhancement when you look at the HTML it’s addressing…

You should 💯 read the rest of this post as well as watch this proposition of Turbolinks from Sam Stephenson at RailsConf 2016. ALSO, we’re recording a show next week with David Heinemeier Hansson about Stimulus, so send us any questions you have by replying to this email, Slack, or Twitter.

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